As I finished up with the last of this week’s articles, Thomas and Ender’s Bluegrass and “White Trash” (2000), I found myself thinking that folklore as a field might be considered the “white trash,” the second-class citizens, of academia. Although “white trash” might not be the most fitting (and surely not the most politically correct) analogy for the field, one of the main points that struck me in this week’s articles was the precarious and uncertain nature of folklore as a distinctly defined discipline. Who are “the folk” and what about them are we really aiming to understand that makes folklore an important subject of inquiry? This problem is first discussed by Bayard (1953) but is a common thread found in each article assigned this week. Studying the “embellishment of the ordinary,” the kitsch, the jokes, the vernacular, the superstitions, the daily lives of ordinary people, the good and the bad, folklorists touch on many topics that overlap or slip between the cracks that separate fields like Anthropology, English, and Art History (Alvarez, class lecture notes 8/23). These are topics (and people) that are ordinarily overlooked in favor of fine art and high culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988), or simply bypassed by other fields which deem such cultural and “social products” as superfluous to study (Bayard 1953:8).
Archaeology has faced similar crises of identity throughout its growth as a field, sometimes independent, and sometimes placed under the umbrella of anthropology. Its purpose and goals as a field have similarly been questioned internally and from other academic fields, especially in historical archaeology where the question has often arisen, “If we have historical documents, why do we need to do archaeology on historic sites?” In essence, this boils down to making the case for why what you study is important. The idea that kept recurring in my head throughout last week and this week’s reading was how similar these fields are in their focus on often marginalized groups, everyday life, and oft ignored “dirty” details that creates the full picture of a community or society. As Thomas and Enders point out, folklorists (and archaeologists) must make a strong case for taking on topics that may be avoided or deemed unimportant by other fields, like low class citizens.
As a historical archaeologist focused on the early fur trade in the American Pacific Northwest, I’m interested in getting at Native American life during the period of early contact and subsequent colonial interactions in the Northwest. This is a group of people that does not get to speak for itself in the documentary record, so archaeology becomes an important part of illuminating the lives of Native people, the untold stories and overlooked details of daily life that were not deemed important enough to write down by early explorers and missionaries. Archaeologists have the unique opportunity to discover the parts of the past that people try to hide, because we will literally dig through your trash to find it. Therefore, no topic is off-limits: hillbillies of Appalachia, brothels in colonial Boston (see link for more info on a really cool site: http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/summer11/brothel/), life in a slave quarter in the Deep South, or the first encounters with the noble (or bloodthirsty, depending on who you talk to) savages of the New World. Closer study by those academians from the “toy department” disciplines like folklore and archaeology (because after all, what we really do is just play in dirt, right?) reveals more about social, cultural, economic, political, and religious undercurrents than some might give us credit for!
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